Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Some films are confusing because they do not really know what they want to be, while others use confusion as part of the design. This clearly belongs to the second group. It begins in a strange way, jumps between characters, rewinds to show how they got there, and for a while asks you to trust that all this apparent disorder will eventually make sense.

The best part is that it does. The fragmented structure, which can initially feel arbitrary, gradually reveals itself as one of the film's main strengths. Each character contributes a different piece, and once the whole begins to fit together, it becomes clear that the early weirdness was not gratuitous. Gore Verbinski organizes the chaos with far more precision than it first appears.

Sam Rockwell is perfect for holding together this kind of tone. His character arrives with a mixture of exhaustion, urgency and the appearance of a man nobody should entirely believe, yet he behaves as if he is the only person who understands how serious everything is. He is part deranged prophet and part completely burned-out hero, and Rockwell moves easily between comedy, desperation and absurdity.

The film mixes science fiction, black comedy, action and a very recognizable anxiety about contemporary technology. It looks at a society increasingly dependent on screens, algorithms and systems that promise to make life easier while occupying spaces we once considered exclusively human. Its ideas are hardly subtle, but it has enough energy to stop the message from turning into a lecture.

It is also darker than its manic surface initially suggests. Beneath the jokes and frantic pacing are characters shaped by loss, guilt, isolation and a sense of powerlessness in a world that seems to have lost control. That contrast between the ridiculous and the painful gives the film considerably more substance than it appears to have at first.

Not every idea works equally well. Sometimes it tries to fit in too much, some jokes run long, and there are moments when the excess threatens to swallow the film itself. But even when it loses control, it is difficult to accuse it of being routine. I would rather watch a film that risks going too far than one running entirely on autopilot.

Visually, it has personality too. Verbinski rediscovers his taste for movement, exaggeration and images slightly distorted by absurdity. There is a constant feeling that the world is a little off its axis, which fits perfectly with a story that turns our technological fears into a kind of comic nightmare.

The ensemble works because nobody tries to anchor the film permanently in a single register. The characters can be ridiculous one minute and genuinely sad the next. That tonal elasticity could have been a disaster, but most of the time it ends up helping the story.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die begins weird and spends quite a while determined to become even weirder. Yet behind the apparent chaos is a carefully constructed structure. It is original, entertaining, funny, dark and distinctive enough not to blur into every other recent science-fiction comedy. Not everything fits with the same precision, but by the time it ends, it feels like something with a personality of its own, and that already counts for a lot.